The Bibliography of a Map

“You will moreover as to be so good to see Mr. Patterson from August and inform him that I have not yet received the plat of the turnpike road from Staunton to Scottsville, which must be sent on very soon if it is to appear on the map,” wrote Herman Bőÿe to William H. Richardson, Clerk of the Executive Department in February 1826. Bőÿe was in Philadelphia overseeing the engraving of Virginia’s large nine-sheet map in Henry Tanner’s workshop. Bőÿe was responsible for not only supervising the county mapping project but its engraving, too. Until the very last stages of the engraving process, he continued to add recently completed survey work by civil engineers employed with Virginia’s Board of Public Works (BPW). A Map of the State of Virginia (1826) has an extensive bibliography; Bőÿe consulted several sources, making the Commonwealth’s first official map an accurate and up to date publication.¹

John Wood’s death in May 1822 stalled Virginia’s mapping project, as he had planned to have the General Map of Virginia’s rough draft completed by August. Bőÿe continued Wood’s work and submitted a 44 square foot manuscript to Governor Pleasants two and a half years later. He conducted research using Thomas M. Randolph’s library, where John Wood’s papers may have been stored. Between November 1822 and April 1825 Boye reduced the county maps completed under his and Wood’s supervision.

He copied all surveys that had been submitted by BPW civil engineers (“which were taken with greater accuracy than those from which the county maps were made”); gathered information about western portions of the state; consulted plans in the Executive department that Wood had not consulted; and talked to Colonel Gratiot of the U.S. Topographical Corps, requesting “copies of charts and maps, including a very accurate chart of the Chesapeake Bay, a topographical map of eastern Virginia and others of minor importance.”²

The collections of the National Archives include several manuscript maps of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay that were charted in 1818. U.S. topographical engineers charted the bay’s waterways and captured important cultural information for Virginia counties like Norfolk and Princess Anne. Presently, these are found in Record Group 77: Records of the Office of Chief of Engineers, within the “Civil Works Map File” series and the “Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay” file unit at the National Archives. The first map in the series, No. 1 Reconnoitering of the Chesapeake Bay, identifies shoals and flats, lists placenames, and documents major roads in red.

Other charts from this series document specific locations within the Chesapeake Bay, like Little Creek and Willoughby Bay. Bőÿe combined information from these charts with those from the county mapping project and the Board of Public Works.

Between 1816 and 1826 civil engineers and surveyors employed by the BPW drafted eighty-seven manuscript maps; there are several others that are undated that may have been accessible to Herman Bőÿe. The bulk of them were created under the purview of the James River Company and document the James River Valley, the Jackson and Rivanna Rivers, and the James and Kanawha Turnpike Road. Others record the Kempsville, Manchester, and Tuckahoe canals as well as surveys for navigation companies operating in Virginia’s waterways. Other surveys available to Bőÿe include those completed as part of the project to map the divisions of the state. In his correspondence with Richardson in 1826, Boye references a survey completed by Briggs and Moore that he had copied. The guide to the Board of Public Works Inventory collection at the Library of Virginia lists only one map completed by them, a map of the Manchester Canal.

Henry S. Tanner of Philadelphia won the contract to engrave the Commonwealth’s map in 1825. While waiting for the agreement to be finalized, Bőÿe corrected the manuscript map, and traveled to Baltimore, where he researched the archives of the Navy and War Department offices. He spent the winter of 1825-1826 in Philadelphia and likely spent time consulting the collections of the American Philosophical Society (APS). So impressed by his experience, Bőÿe requested that Governor Giles gift a copy of the nine-sheet map to the APS because they had a “useful library and the various collections consist of donations from individual and public bodies both in this country and abroad.”³

Bőÿe’s draft of the great map of Virginia was well-researched and incorporated data from the latest maps and surveys. The map that was published by the Commonwealth in 1826 was an artistic and data-driven marvel, representing the technological innovations and craftsmanship of the nineteenth century. A Map of the State of Virginia’s bibliography is impressive!